A relatively short article with some key assertions. The first paragraph is definitely going to irritate some people here. But the main thrust of the article is presented later, which is -
China’s late Cold War role as the great anti-communist power in the East, and its subsequent role in financing the American empire as it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
The article lays out a lot of history as it relates to the Sino-Soviet relations and shows how as a result -
The CCP picked the side of capital in the Cold War, doomed the international communist movement in the process
Most important is this paragraph w.r.t the Cold War -
The first sign of betrayal was China’s active role in supporting Pakistan during the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh By 1972, Mao’s meeting with Richard Nixon signaled that the full anti-communist pivot was complete. With this pivot, China became a close American ally and the bulwark of anti-communism in East Asia and beyond. By the middle of the decade, the CCP was giving out loans to Pinochet, supporting UNITA in Angola alongside South Africa and the US against Cuba and the Soviet Union and had opened diplomatic relations with reactionary capitalist powers, from the Marcos regime in the Philippines to Japan. Deng Xiaoping sealed this alliance by invading Vietnam in 1979 in defense of the US-backed Khmer Rouge which the Vietnamese government had been attempting to overthrow. The CCP claims to have killed 100,000 Vietnamese communists in that war, which broke the back of the communist movement in East Asia and essentially ended it as a Cold War front , thus allowing the US to fully pivot to its massacres in Latin America and Africa in addition to the defense of Europe against the USSR and domestic communist movements.
And in the post-Soviet world -
Unlike other major American bond purchasers (Japan, South Korea, Germany) who are American military protectorates and can thus even be coerced into increasing the value of their currency, China subsidizes the American war machine ... CCP funds America’s wars in order to maintain the high value of the dollar relative to the yuan, which gives China a massive competitive edge in manufacturing and is a critical source of China’s massive economic growth.
In coalition with the East Asian American military protectorates, China filled the massive budget shortfalls that resulted from the combination of the Iraq War, Bush era tax cuts, and the early 2000s recession, propping up the flailing US economy as the war commenced. Chinese bond purchases intensified with US spending in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the CCP became an eager participant in the new War on Terror by allying closely with Israel, adopting American counterinsurgency techniques and technologies from the rapidly burgeoning trade, and eventually hiring American mercenary Erik Prince for themselves for deployment in “Xinjiang.”
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The much larger difference between the Iraq & Afghan Wars and the Vietnam War was the transition from the gold-backed USD to the petrodollar.
The 1973 oil crisis ended with a US monopoly on the global oil supply. First Saudi Arabia, then OPEC in general, agreed to only sell their oil in USD. Every country which purchases oil through OPEC has to buy US debts. That's not unique to China.
Adam Curtis would not have a contract with the BBC if he didn't misrepresent socialist states.
bbc is so fucking bad. it's literal state propaganda. why the fuck to liberals even listen to it (but still cry state censorship/bias when you cite rt or people's daily or global times or something.
Why does buying oil through OPEC result in buying US debt? Are the two tied to each other?
Other countries having to buy U.S dollars simply allows the U.S to run more debt.
I'll look that up, thanks. It's not an argument I've really heard before.
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A'ight, thanks. I'm waiting for someone else to address that here lol. Lot of people raising lot of good points but so far no one's countered the last two paras of the post.
Edit - @JoeySteel has provided a response below.